Conservative Backlash

Developing countries have been rocked lately with waves of deadly rioting as a result of increasing food prices and looming famine. They can thank, in no small part, our very own Noble Prize Winner Al Gore for their hunger and starvation. In getting caught up in his own hype and hysteria as Mother Earth’s savior, this inconvenient jackass never stopped to consider the incentives and catastrophic consequences his alarmist agenda would create.

The impetus behind rising food prices? The government subsidies to ethanol production pushed by Gore and his cadre of enviro-fascists. Here’s what he said in 1998 about the subsidies, nine years before he regaled us with an Oscar-winning performance:

“I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress — at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it. The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be.”

Fast-forward to the present and surprise, surprise: heavily subsidizing ethanol distorted farmers’ economic incentives and grossly shifted the use of corn from feed and human consumption (read: food) to the production of more ethanol as a substitute for gasoline.

The US is one of the largest contributors to the world corn market, and thus even a modest diversion away from corn used for feed and human consumption would have a rippling effect on global food prices. Because of subsidies, however, US farmers reallocated over a quarter of the acreage devoted to food grains to acreage devoted to ethanol production. The reduced supply in food grains coupled with added demand from growing populations has, naturally, led to higher food prices.

The current crisis is, by and large, a result of willful ignorance by an opportunistic politician of the dangers of government meddling in the market. It should come as no shock, then, that our laureate himself has a financial stake in pushing bio-fuels down our collective throats. His private equity firm has invested millions of dollars in a deep portfolio of renewable energy businesses, and the mad dash toward bio-fuels has netted him a fortune.

As for reducing our dependency on oil and shifting to more eco-friendly energy, well, wouldn’t you know it, ethanol and other bio-fuels have proven terribly inefficient substitutes and aren’t so green after all.

Now that’s an inconvenient truth.